I saw a monster.
When man sees a monster and lives to form a sentence afterwards, he will scream about it, scream it to all his fellow men, scream it to the mountains, etch the encounter into his tongue. Even when his tongue dries and his skull rings empty with eternal silence, the wagging of his tongue will be felt in every contour of the tale as it hurtles from shore to shore, generation to generation, dissolving into the smoke of a bonfire, mixing with the sweat and fear of men reduced to children for a few dimly-lit moments.
I saw a monster. I chose to scream to an online forum where people can afford the luxury of disbelieving these tales, every response a variation of ‘Of course it’s real’, wink-wink. To hear a story comfortably behind a veneer of suspended belief. Thank god for that. You’ll never sit late at night thinking about where this story came from, brain grappling with the possibility that you may have just inherited a piece of cursed knowledge, the latest addition in a long, long chain of fools who heard the wrong thing, stumbling into the vision of some hungry, vicious thing that’d snatch you from your bed and leave no trace, and your life distilling with time into nothing but a tragic, unsolved mystery. Thank god for that.
Disbelief protects us. Suspend your belief.
When you believe in it, you see it. When you see it, it sees you.
Nothing on this subreddit is real. Neither is the monster I saw at 76445 Makenna Mills, Hellerland, North Carolina, 72214-7196, 51.89186, 45.40530. There is no monster at the house in 76445 Makenna Mills, Hellerland, North Carolina, 72214-7196, 51.89186, 45.40530.
It did not start in that house. But they were the first to believe. They say it creeped in from a starless place that lay beyond this universe, where the only living things existed to deceive and devour other living things, or feasted on the carcasses of whatever floated down from the abyssal darkness. The lights in the abyss were bright, too bright. Once you saw them, the world around faded to a distant blip, and they grew brighter and brighter until you prayed for the whole world to be lost in it’s radiance. And then you saw the thing with too many eyes and no limbs.
The thing had stalked the abyss. Then it seeded itself in our collective consciousness, a pale, sick flower growing amidst bogeymen and shadow-men who stood at the foot of your bed while you slept and unblinking women who stared at you through the slits in your windows.
Once you think it’s real, it becomes real. First, it will appear to you in your dreams. It will cross the lonely highway in the dead of the night while the light of a broken headlight illuminates a single eye. It will watch you from the window on the fifth floor of the apartment that faces your room, it will stand in the reflection of your television, it will breathe on your neck as you lock the door before going to sleep. But none of it is real, because there is no monster at the house in 76445 Makenna Mills. In a moment of desperation, your mind will give in to insanity, fleeting, fizzling out in a matter of seconds, but you will have allowed yourself to believe that the thing moving beneath your bedsheets is real and that will be enough. You will have seen it, and then it will see you, and then it will take you, not immediately but at some point in the excruciatingly long night where your heart beats to the panicked leaps every atom of your body takes as it wonders whether something is wrong or whether you’ve convinced yourself something is wrong.
Of course, none of this is real. Nothing is real about what happened to the family in 76445 Makenna Mills.
The officer told me that the son had decomposed in his sleep. Simply died, mortal coil snipped, rotting till he formed a putrid mess under the blankets. The mother, the father, the sister and the dog were never found.
Some things do not exist until they have been conceived of. Some things exist solely because they have been conceived of, and once they have tasted the sweet, saccharine air of existence, they will remain there like a bad stench, constructing demented games to pop back into reality as frequently as possible.
When you see it, it sees you.
The entire family had seen it before they vanished. Talked to the police about it, then the psychiatrists. Breathing on their neck. Eyes watching them from every narrow slit and keyhole. They believed it was a stalker, right up until that night, and then the fear of something greater filled them, and they believed it was the thing that had eyes for skin and skin for eyes.
Don’t believe in it. Don’t conceive of it. Everything here is a campfire tale, microwaved into words from old formulae. I only come here to warn you of the thing staring up at the building on 7486 Bergnaum Mission, Clarksville. Everything here is plausible, on the verge of being possible, still teetering on the edges of reality. So I can warn you about the thing climbing down the walls of the building 7486 Bergnaum Mission, Clarksville.
Something walked out of the house on 76445 Makenna Mills, wearing the skin of a father, a mother and a daughter. I saw it. If you see it and it sees you and it spares you, do not turn around and conceive of it a second time. Simply close your eyes and repeat to yourself: nothing I see is real. Nothing I smell is real.
There are some things that do not understand human suffering. They will pull you apart, tearing you from limb to limb like a playtoy, then breathe the life back into your veins, squealing with utter joy as they watch the face of a creature that has been pieced back together after experiencing the pain of total annihilation.
Thank god nothing on here is real. Even if it isn’t. There’s nothing real about the thing staring through the windows of the building on 7486 Bergnaum Mission, Clarksville, staring right into my soul. It’s starting to seem pretty plausible, though.